Part III of Brian Sommer’s three-part series on Moneyball, golf’s numbers gane, and what statistics truly show
Golf has already embraced the visible part of Moneyball. We have the numbers. We have the models. We have the analysts. We have databases larger than anything Bill James could have imagined when he began asking uncomfortable questions about baseball. What golf has not embraced nearly enough is the intellectual discipline underneath his project.
Ask: What exactly did we observe? What are we inferring? What is merely correlated? What appears predictive? What have we actually established causally? What evidence would prove our explanation wrong? How many unsuccessful players possess the characteristic we are praising? How many successful players do not? Have we measured the source of skill, or simply one expression of it? And perhaps most importantly: Has “this is interesting” quietly become “you need this”?
That last move might be the most consequential one in coaching. Because once a description becomes a necessity, the golfer has acquired another deficiency. Your face is unstable. Your pressure pattern is wrong. Your routine is inconsistent. Your confidence is insufficient. Your emotional regulation needs improvement. Your mindset needs work. Now the coach possesses the solution to the problem the explanation has just created.
Bill James’s instinct was precisely the opposite. Do not begin by protecting the explanation. Begin by interrogating it.
Greatness Is Not a Recipe
Perhaps this is the mistake underneath so much performance analysis. We assume greatness must eventually yield a recipe. If we can identify enough characteristics of Scottie Scheffler, perhaps we will discover the formula for Scottie Scheffler. If we measure Ted Williams closely enough, perhaps we will discover the recipe for Ted Williams. But what if greatness is not a recipe? What if it is an expression? A solution belonging to a particular person interacting with a particular environment over time. That does not mean there are no common principles. It means common principles should not be confused with identical pathways.
The best golfers have to return the club to the ball. They all have to manage the face and path sufficiently to produce useful shots. They each encounter gravity, momentum, turf, wind, equipment, and the laws of physics. Those are real constraints. But universal constraints do not imply universal solutions. Ted Williams and Tony Gwynn each could hit. They did not have to become the same hitter. Miller Barber and Scottie Scheffler could both play extraordinary golf. They did not have to become the same golfer. That should tell us something.
Use the Numbers. Keep the Questions.
The shallow lesson of Moneyball is: The numbers were right. The deeper lesson is: The conventional explanation had not earned the certainty people gave it. That distinction matters. Because one day the analytics themselves become conventional. And then somebody needs to ask Bill James’s question again. Golf should not replace one priesthood with another. Not the old swing guru with the biomechanist. Not intuition with the algorithm. Not superstition with jargon. Not “I’ve seen it for thirty years” with “the research says” when the research established something far narrower. Use all of it. Use the coach’s eye. Use the golfer’s experience. Use TrackMan. Use force plates. Use statistics. Use research. Use high-speed video. But make every explanation earn its authority. Because the great temptation of knowledge is not ignorance. It is premature certainty. And greatness is especially vulnerable to it. We see the champion. We identify something impressive. Then we say: There. That’s why. Perhaps occasionally we are right. More often, I suspect we have located one part of a much larger event and awarded it the entire trophy.
Scottie Scheffler’s clubface may be remarkably stable through impact. That matters. It may help explain the predictability of his ball flight. But many golfers can control the face. They are not Scottie. Ted Williams possessed extraordinary traits. Many other extraordinary hitters possessed many of them too. They were not Ted.
The 2002 Oakland A’s exploited market inefficiencies brilliantly. They also had Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Miguel Tejada. The analytics mattered. So did extraordinary baseball players. Perhaps we should become comfortable holding both truths at once. Data can tell us something tremendously valuable. And data can still stop short of explaining the person producing it. That is not a failure of data. It is simply a boundary we should be honest enough to recognize.
The measurable characteristics of greatness are not necessarily the source of greatness.
Greatness leaves footprints. Study them. Measure them. Learn from them. But don’t confuse the footprints with the journey. That, to me, is the Moneyball lesson golf has yet to fully learn. Bill James did not make baseball smarter simply by giving it better numbers. He made it less comfortable with bad explanations. Golf has all the numbers it could possibly want. What it may need now is the same intellectual courage: the willingness to let reality challenge the story we have built around it.